The way was dark and they moved very slowly, mostly by feel. Natasha switched bags with Lang so she could carry the heavier of the loads and take some of the weight off his shoulders as he slowly began to come back into his body. There was just enough moonlight to allow them to see from tree to tree and make their way, as if by Braille, through the low valley. The branches clung like webs to the nighttime sky, and the brush caught their clothes as they swept past.
These valleys, cut by receding glacial ice, ran primarily from northeast to southwest, which was good for the Warwickians as they made their escape. It meant that they could move steadily through the darkness without having to do a lot of climbing and descending.
Peter intended to walk for a good thirty minutes, but their pace, though steady, was so slow that it was nearly two hours before he felt that they had put enough distance between themselves and the road. They walked a little further, and then the trio came upon a low stone building, very small—maybe eight feet by eight feet. Peter identified it as an old well house.
The building had a wooden door that had mostly rotted away, and around the top of the building, where there had once been a few small windows, were now jagged slices of glass, long ago smashed and broken by who knows what or whom. It took the three of them a good fifteen minutes to drag out all of the trash that had accumulated in the building over the years, but before long, they had it cleaned out enough to use for the night. The floor of the well house was cement, and in the center of the building was only a protruding water pipe, maybe six inches in diameter, which someone had covered with a large rock.
Peter built a very small fire inside the building and explained that he would only let it burn as long as necessary. Fire is a beacon, but sometimes it is necessary, so he intended to obscure it from view as best as he could. He needed to produce coals that they could use to cook their food and heat water for cleaning Lang’s wounds, and then he would let the fire burn just long enough to heat the stones of the building itself, for heat in the night, before the fire would be extinguished.
The big man prepared and started the small fire and showed Natasha how to feed wood into it without letting the flame get too big, and then he took the gun and told Lang he would patrol the perimeter and keep watch until they had enough glowing red coals to do what they needed to do. He stepped out into the night to have a look around.
Lang and Natasha sat for a moment, and she tended the fire and watched him in silence.
“Are you holding up?” he asked, seeing her sink deeper into thought.
“Yes,” Natasha sighed. “I’m fine. I’m just worried about you… and thinking about Kolya.”
“I know,” Lang said. “I am sorry Cole didn’t make it back in time.”
She looked up in distress at the mention of that name, with a silent insistence that he call her brother by his given name.
“Natasha, I’m going to keep calling him Cole because I believe him still to be alive. I’m sure he’s okay. He’s a resourceful fellow.”
“Oh, there is no need to lie, Lang. We both know that he would not have disappeared unless something bad had happened to him. He probably fell into some criminals’ hands and now he’s—”
“Stop. Don’t think that way. He’s fine.” Lang looked at her and wished that he could be more certain of that fact, but the remembrance of the bombed-out remains of Warwick flashed through his mind. The simple truth was that nothing was fine. He shifted his back against the wall and suddenly felt a pain shoot down through his arm and realized that, even on that account, there was nothing about the situation that was fine.
“Here. Let me take a look at you,” Natasha said, and she pulled Lang’s shirt back slightly, hearing the cold sucking sound of the coagulated blood ripping slightly from his skin as she bent over his wound.
“Ow, Ow. Ow!” Lang said, before he gritted his teeth and leaned back again into the wall, suddenly becoming aware of the warmth in her hands.
“Is it bad?”
“It’s fine. It’ll be okay.”
“Now who’s lying?” Lang replied, attempting a small grin as a kind of gallows humor. Natasha grinned back, and somehow this made the pain in his arm begin to lessen.
They sat and talked as Natasha tended to the fire, and they both tried to encourage each other for what seemed like an hour. They spoke of the strangeness of their journey and the tiredness of their hopes. They talked of how their lives had seemed somehow… shortened… having been ripped out from under them by the flash of recent events. “It seems like yesterday that Kolya and I were getting ready for the Fall Festival,” Natasha said.
“It seems like a minute ago that you were telling him to stop with his damned Shakespeare,” Lang smiled. “I wonder what he would have to say about this fine mess?”
In that vein, they went on speaking and reminiscing, echoing the same kind of conversation that was taking place around millions of campfires at that very moment, spread across the landscape of America and, beyond that, the globe.
Indeed, had one been lodged in the middle distance between heaven and earth at that moment; or maybe parachuting down from the outer reaches of space in a tumbling freefall that had not yet leveled out; had one not gained a controlling vantage point in that middle distance; if one had looked upward and then downward in that tumbling spiral in the darkness of space, it would have been difficult to tell which were the fires burning on the ground around the millions of campfires like this one, and which ones were raging in the hearts of a million stars.
Before long, Peter returned from his patrol, and, seeing that the fire was prepared and ready, he used a piece of scrap corrugated tin from the refuse pile to scoop hot coals into two shallow holes dug just outside the building. Each of the holes was about five inches deep and just big enough around to receive the stainless steel pans from the mess kit in his pack.
He built up the fire in the building by adding more of the old two-by-fours and scraps of wood from the refuse pile, and then he closed the dilapidated door to obscure the fire, as much as possible, from anyone who might be lurking in the shadows of the woods. They would let the inside fire burn for an hour, and then they would sweep it out and douse it with the snow. The old stones of the building would then emit their warmth throughout the night as the three friends slept like buns in an old stone oven. At least, that was the theory.
Lang and Natasha watched as Peter filled one of the pots with snow to melt for boiling, and in the other, he placed some food from the backpacks to warm. He watched diligently over both pots and continued to add snow to the water pan as it melted down. Lang noticed that it took a lot of snow to create an appreciable amount of water. Once that pan was full and boiling, he placed two ripped cloths from his pack into the water and let them boil for several minutes, and while they boiled, he examined Lang’s wound.
“It looks like you were hit with a .22 or a .38. Something small. There is no bullet in the wound, and it’s still bleeding, but not too profusely. As the bullet passed through, it ripped the skin and flesh, but it doesn’t look like it pierced the muscle too deeply.” He was silent for a moment as he worked, then he turned to Natasha, who seemed to be terribly worried and afraid. “No arteries were hit, and the bleeding is steady, but not heavy. More of a seepage than a flow.” She nodded her head but kept her hand covering her mouth, as if she might need it there to stifle a cry or sob. “Natasha, dear, could you bring me that bottle of vodka from my pack?”
“Sure,” she replied and hustled off to get it, happy again to be of some use. She made a point as she went through the pack to catalog in her mind all of the things she was seeing. She wanted to be able to do this if ever the situation, God forbid, were to arise again.